How Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Got Barack Obama Elected

While cramming for my interview with
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes at the Startup 2009 conference
tomorrow, I came across this recent Fast Company profile.
It details Chris's experiences on the Obama campaign, as well as
the early Facebook days at Harvard.

I'd heard the Obama online story before, from Tom Gensemer at
Blue States Digital (the consulting firm that built the
platform), but the details are still startling.

In case you don't know Chris, he started Facebook with Mark
Zuckerberg at Harvard and then left the company in 2007 to join
the then-longshot Obama's campaign. Chris led the
development of MyBO, the grass-roots online community platform
that helped galvanize Obama's local supporters and win the
election.

Here's the intro to Ellen McGirt's profile...

Ellen McGirt, Fast Company: Chris Hughes is having a
philosophical moment. "I don't really know what 'community'
means. And I never use that word."

We are in Washington, D.C., just three days before his most
recent boss, Barack Obama, will take office. It is so
bone-jarringly cold that even nestled over coffee inside a
Starbucks, we can see our breath. I resist the urge to pat his
nearly whiskerless cheek, or reach over to tighten his jacket
against the frigid air. Such a baby face. But at the age of 25,
Hughes has helped create two of the most successful startups in
modern history, Facebook and the campaign apparatus that got
Barack Obama elected. Both were dedicated to the proposition that
communities, and the way we share and interact within them, are
vitally important. As he recounts his two years as director of
online organizing for the man who put community organizing on the
map, the existential reverie is understandable. He doesn't know
what community means? Really? "Well, I just never think of myself
as being in the business of building an online
community."

Hughes is a technology star whose business is people. At Facebook
and in the Obama campaign, he has been plowing what he observes
about human behavior into online systems that help real people do
what they want to do in their real lives. He helped develop the
most robust set of Web-based social-networking tools ever used in
a political campaign, enabling energized citizens to turn
themselves into activists, long before a single human field
staffer arrived to show them how.

"Technology has always been used as a net to capture people in a
campaign or cause, but not to organize," says Obama campaign
manager David Plouffe. "Chris saw what was possible before anyone
else." Hughes built something the candidate said he wanted but
didn't yet know was possible: a virtual mechanism for scaling and
supporting community action. Then that community turned around
and elected his boss president. "I still can't quite wrap my mind
around it," Hughes says.

His key tool was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short, a
surprisingly intuitive and fun-to-use networking Web site that
allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise
funds, download tools, and connect with one another -- not unlike
a more focused, activist Facebook. MyBO also let the campaign
reach its most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By
the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than
2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events,
formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30
million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages...